If Democrats are to have any hope of retaking the Senate this fall, then Roy Cooper, the former North Carolina governor, must flip the seat held by retiring GOP Sen. Thom Tillis, in one of the most anticipated races of the 2026 midterms. The stakes of the race have already led to an influx of cash and media attention: Cooper, who will likely be running against former RNC chair Michael Whatley, set fundraising records the day after announcing his candidacy last July, in a contest that could be one of the most expensive in history.  For North Carolinians like me, long before Cooper had the fate of the Senate resting on his shoulders, he was a familiar fixture in state politics. Cooper joined the state legislature in 1987 before serving four consecutive terms as the state attorney general, then winning the governorship in 2016 and again in 2020.  As a state politician, Cooper’s style was often about getting results, even when it meant working with Republicans or breaking with his own party. As governor, he’s remembered for working with Republicans to repeal HB2, which prohibited transgender people from using public restrooms aligned with their gender identity, and for passing Medicaid expansion with bipartisan support. But his gubernatorial career was also defined by a contentious relationship with state Republicans who held a supermajority in the legislature—and thus the ability to overturn Cooper’s vetoes—for four of his eight years in the office. As governor, Cooper vetoed 104 bills. Republicans overturned half of those.  > I remember Cooper campaigning for his first gubernatorial bid on my college’s > campus and sitting courtside at basketball games. To me, he seemed like he > could’ve been a classmate’s dad. Despite those political battles, Cooper has managed to remain pretty well liked by voters in a long-time purple state growing redder (thanks, in part, to newly drawn congressional maps). North Carolina has the country’s second largest rural population and, to reach these voters, Cooper often touts his upbringing in rural Eastern North Carolina as an indicator of his trustworthiness. North Carolinians will be familiar with his stories of cropping tobacco on his family’s farm during the summers and his frequent reminders that his mother was a public school teacher.  I remember Cooper campaigning for his first gubernatorial bid on my college’s campus and sitting courtside at basketball games. To me, he seemed like he could’ve been a classmate’s dad. He ate Bojangles. He liked Cheerwine. He’s a self-described “caniac”—a fan of the North Carolina hockey team, the Carolina Hurricanes. But will this nice-guy appeal be enough to propel Cooper to victory when the stakes are higher than ever? Recently, I traveled to Nash County, where Cooper grew up, to find out.  I’m from Eastern North Carolina, about an hour and a half from Nash County. I’ve spent a lot of time driving through this area and have become familiar with the landscape: lots of pine, oak, and maple trees; state roads curving through small towns; plenty of lakes, rivers, and creeks. Driving around Nash County feels familiar, with its rows of crops—this time of year, likely cabbage or collards. Nash has strong railroad ties, so I often bumped over tracks as I drove around.  While some parts of Nash County feel like forgotten ghost towns, others are seeing a surge of new development. Rocky Mount Mills, once a thriving cotton mill at the center of the county’s largest city, is now a bustling campus with bars and businesses where locals and visitors gather. In nearby counties, it’s become common to see a Trump flag hanging next to a Confederate flag or Trump signs outside of homes, businesses, or roadside produce stands. But driving through Nash that day, the only political ad I saw was from a 2022 congressional campaign. Nash County’s political allegiances are a bit of a mystery, with the rural county emerging as a bellwether in recent elections. Since 2012, the county has supported the winning candidate in each US presidential election. And when President Donald Trump won the county (and the state) in 2016, so did Cooper.  I drove into Rocky Mount and stopped at a coffee shop, where I saw a chalk sandwich board that read, “Welcome. All are friends.” A few of the employees said they didn’t know enough about Cooper to have strong opinions about him. Opinions about Cooper around town are “mixed,” one barista told me. While in Nash, I met with Harris Walker, a Rocky Mount native running for North Carolina General Assembly, at a burger spot. As a kid, Walker volunteered for one of Cooper’s earlier state assembly runs, helping distribute pamphlets. I asked if Cooper’s long political career in the state had inspired Walker to run for office. “When he was representing Nash County he always fought for what would improve the livelihoods of people right here. Yeah, that did inspire me,” Walker said. “Watching Roy come from here and be able to follow that trajectory was important.”  Walker knew he wanted to go into politics one day, so when he was a teenager, Cooper sponsored him to be a legislative page in the state’s General Assembly. When Walker’s grandparents died during Cooper’s tenure as attorney general, Cooper attended their funerals, where he sat in the back. “It wasn’t a campaign thing for him,” Walker said. “That’s Roy Cooper.” Still at the burger spot, I asked my waitress what she thought of Cooper as I paid my bill. She turned her head to the side. “Who’s that?” I briefly went through Cooper’s bio. “Oh, I think I like him? Well, I think I voted for him,” she replied.  Before he was going toe-to-toe with lawmakers in Raleigh, Cooper was a managing partner at the law firm his father co-founded, Fields & Cooper, in the town of Nashville. In 1997, he hired Mark Edwards, a Nash County native who’d just graduated from law school at Wake Forest University. Edwards, who chaired the Nash County Republican Party from 2009 until last year, surmises that Cooper’s time in the smaller firm in Nashville helped prepare him for his role as attorney general. “He just has a very practical demeanor about himself and is able to relate to almost anyone in any circumstance,” Edwards said. “I could see that when he was practicing law and I could see that when he was serving as attorney general.”  Walker told me he thinks many folks are proud that Cooper is from Nash County, but Edwards wonders if the national stage of a US Senate race will change that. “It’s going to be a much more partisan affair, and if he were to win, I’ll be curious to see if there’s that same feeling,” Edwards said.  Later in the day, I drove into Rocky Mount’s downtown and met Cassandra Conover, who chairs the Nash County Democratic Party, at the party’s headquarters near an old train station. Conover and her husband, John, moved to Nash County from Petersburg, Virginia, just before the pandemic. Conover, who was a longtime prosecutor in Virginia, wasn’t surprised to hear that some people were un-opinionated about Cooper. She explained that there’s a “level of apathy” about politics in the county. But she hopes that’s changing. Each of the county’s 24 voting precincts enlists a chair to help organize elections and reach voters in their precincts, but when Conover arrived, most of the positions were vacant. Now, all but one precinct is chaired.  Because Cooper’s a familiar name around town, Conover thinks voters in the county are comfortable with him as a candidate. Cooper “has demonstrated the things that make him more credible and more authentic,” Conover said. “And that’s what the voters right here are looking for.”  > “He was the governor for all the people,” Roberson said. “And going into the > Senate, I feel that he’ll be a Senator for all of the people.”   Nearly everyone I spoke to recalled Cooper coming back to Nash County for various reasons: to attend funerals, birthday parties, community events, and to visit and care for his aging parents.   Morris Roberson, whose brothers attended Northern Nash High School (one of the first Rocky Mount schools to integrate) with Cooper and played with him on the football team there, remembered Cooper visiting Rocky Mount for the 85th birthday party of his high school basketball coach, Bobby Dunn. Cooper attended the event wearing his high school letterman jacket and shared a few words with the crowd. Roberson thinks Cooper will “represent the masses” if elected to the Senate. “He was the governor for all the people,” Roberson said. “And going into the Senate, I feel that he’ll be a Senator for all of the people.”   Brenda Brown, the Republican mayor of Nashville, lived next to Cooper’s parents for years. Just a few years older than the former governor, Brown remembers Cooper as a “regular Nash County boy with ambitions.” Despite their political disagreements, Brown describes Cooper as a “great person.” “He hasn’t lost the connection with Nashville, and it is appreciated,” Brown said.  Echoing the barista I spoke to earlier, Brown said that now, opinions are “mixed” when it comes to Cooper. “I think he still has a lot of respect from our county for what he did as governor, but at the same time, I think there’s some people that were disappointed,” she said. Of course, not all Republicans take as favorable a view of Cooper. State Republicans—including Whatley—blamed the August murder of a passenger on a Charlotte light-rail train on Cooper’s “soft on crime” policies. Cooper has also been repeatedly criticized by Republicans for how his administration handled disaster relief efforts after Hurricane Helene. Under his administration, the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, which assists homeowners with disaster recovery efforts, was mismanaged and left many hurricane victims displaced.  While the latest polling shows Cooper with a comfortable lead on Whatley, only Election Day will prove whether Cooper’s homegrown persona is enough to win a national race. To do so, he’ll have to not only win urban areas like Raleigh and Charlotte, but also minimize his losses in some of the state’s more conservative rural counties—where trailing Whatley by 10, 15, or even 25 points would be a triumph for any Democrat. If Cooper can repeat his performance as a gubernatorial candidate and “lose less badly” in those counties, he may be on track to victory, said Asher Hildebrand, a professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. “That is important at a time when many voters—especially right of center voters—feel kind of looked down on by today’s Democratic Party,” Hildebrand said. Though Democratic candidates on both ends of the spectrum—from democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani to moderate Abigail Spanberger—celebrated victories in November’s elections, politicians like Cooper are an increasingly rare breed. In many ways, Cooper is a “bridge” between the Democratic Party of the last century and the party today, Hildebrand said. When he was elected governor, Cooper was a relatively moderate former state AG with an “ideological pragmatism” reminiscent of 20th-century Democratic governors, who valued getting work done over party allegiance, Hildebrand said. But though he never lost that results-oriented approach, his governorship also came in an era of increased partisan fighting and ideological orthodoxy, shaped by what Hildebrand describes as “a political ecosystem that rewards stridency over compromise.” Somehow, Cooper has managed to hold on to his nice-guy reputation despite that—at least in his home county. In North Carolina, where unaffiliated voters outnumber both major parties, Cooper’s likability could be valuable. “He has an ability to connect with voters in a way that is authentic and respectful and doesn’t look down on them,” Hildebrand said. Cooper’s style is “a throwback to politics as it once was. It’s a throwback that I think a lot of voters still want in this era.”

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said on Wednesday that he would reject a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security for the rest of the fiscal year over concerns that it did not sufficiently curb Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations.  The announcement came in a closed-door meeting with Democratic caucus members, following continued ICE violence in Minnesota as part of Operation Metro Surge.  “We’ve heard our members speak loudly that ICE isn’t doing enough, these reforms aren’t doing enough. This lawlessness has to stop,” Democratic Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar (D-CA) told reporters after the meeting on Wednesday. “They are only doing this because they can. They are only doing this because the president of the United States wants to use them to terrorize communities, to terrorize U.S. citizens.” But, according to NBC News, Democratic leaders did not state they would whip a vote to push all members to follow their “no” vote. This leaves the door open for Democrats, many of whom are facing close elections this year, to vote in favor of the appropriation bill.  The House Appropriations Committee released the DHS funding bill on Tuesday with three other appropriation bills for the departments of Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and other related agencies. Those three bills are grouped into a single vote, while the DHS bill is separate.   Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), a conservative who participated in negotiations with Republicans on the legislation as the lead Democrat on the Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, voiced support for the bill in the meeting, NBC News reported.  The bill maintains funding for ICE at $10 billion. Still, it includes some guardrails, including allocating $20 million of the budget to body cameras for ICE and CBP officers, and reducing $115 million from ICE enforcement and removal operations. It also cuts Border Patrol funding by $1.8 billion and provides $20 million for mandated, independent oversight of detention facilities According to House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), the bill doesn’t include “broader reforms proposed by Democrats, including preventing U.S. citizens from being detained or deported and preventing non-ICE personnel from conducting interior enforcement.” DeLauro acknowledged the bill would frustrate many Democratic lawmakers, but said it was necessary to fund numerous agencies, such as FEMA, the US Coast Guard, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. She also noted that ICE received $75 billion from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, so if no appropriations legislation passed, ICE would still be able to function for years while other agencies would struggle.  This vote is expected to take place on Thursday, amid despicable cruelty being inflicted on individuals, families, and communities. As my colleague Isabela Dias wrote last week, the policies behind ICE’s violence are intentional. It will take more to stop it. 

In a big win for Democrats, a federal court panel on Wednesday upheld a new voter-approved congressional map in California that was designed to give Democrats five new seats in the U.S. House, offsetting the mid-decade gerrymander passed by Texas Republicans over the summer. Republicans challenged the map after voters overwhelmingly approved it last November, arguing that it was a racial gerrymander intended to benefit Hispanic voters. But Judge Josephine Staton, an appointee of President Barack Obama, and District Judge Wesley Hsu, an appointee of President Joe Biden, disagreed, finding that “the evidence of any racial motivation driving redistricting is exceptionally weak, while the evidence of partisan motivations is overwhelming.” They cited a 2019 opinion from the US Supreme Court ruling that partisan gerrymandering claims could not be challenged in federal court and concluded in this case that California “voters intended to adopt the Proposition 50 Map as a partisan counterweight to Texas’s redistricting.” Judge Kenneth Lee, an appointee of President Donald Trump on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, wrote a dissenting opinion, saying he would block the map because Democrats allegedly bolstered Hispanic voting strength in one district in the Central Valley, “as part of a racial spoils system to award a key constituency that may be drifting away from the Democratic party.” Republicans will surely appeal to the Supreme Court, but may not have better luck there. When the Court upheld Texas’s congressional map in November after a lower court found that is discriminated against minority voters, Justice Samuel Alito wrote a concurring opinion maintaining that it was “indisputable that the impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple.” Though the Roberts Court has frequently sided with Republicans in election cases, it would be the height of hypocrisy for the Court to uphold Texas’s map, then strike down California’s. The California map is a major reason why Democrats have unexpectedly pulled close to even with Republicans in the gerrymandering arms race started by Trump. But the Supreme Court could still give Republicans another way to massively rig the midterms if it invalidates the key remaining section of the Voting Rights Act in a redistricting case pending from Louisiana, which could shift up to 19 House seats in the GOP’s favor, making it very difficult, if not impossible, for Democrats to retake the House in 2026.

A year ago this month, President Donald Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people responsible for the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. When Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political science professor who studies domestic political violence, heard about the pardons, he says he immediately thought it was “going to be the worst thing that happened in the second Trump presidency.” The first year of Trump’s second term has been a blizzard of policies and executive actions that have shattered presidential norms, been challenged in court as unlawful, threatened to remake the federal government, and redefined the limits of presidential power. But Pape argues that Trump’s decision to pardon and set free the January 6 insurrectionists, including hundreds who had been found guilty of assaulting police, could be the most consequential decision of his second term. “There are many ways we could lose our democracy. But the most worrisome way is through political violence,” Pape says. “Because the political violence is what would make the democratic backsliding you’re so used to hearing about irreversible. And then how might that actually happen? You get people willing to fight for Trump.” Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. On this week’s More To The Story, Pape talks with host Al Letson about how America’s transformation to a white minority is fueling the nation’s growing political violence, the remarkable political geography of the insurrectionists, and the glimmers of hope he’s found in his research that democracy can survive this pivotal moment in history. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: Bob, how are you today? Robert Pape: Oh, I’m great. I’m terrific. This is just a great time to be in Chicago. A little cold, but that’s Chicago. I was about to say, great time for you. I’m a Florida boy, so I was just in Chicago, I was like, let me go home. So Bob, I thought I would kind of start off a little bit and kind of give you my background into why I’m really interested about the things that we’re going to be talking about today, right after Charlottesville happened. When I look back now, I feel like it was such a precursor for where we are today. And also I think in 2016 I was looking back and it felt like… Strangely, it felt like Oklahoma City, the bombing in Oklahoma City was a precursor for that. Ever since then, I’ve just really been thinking a lot about where we are as a society and political violence in America. The origins of it, which I think are baked deeply into the country itself. But I’m also very interested on where we’re going, because I believe that leadership plays a big role in that, right? And so when you have leaders that try to walk us back from the edge, we walk back from the edge. When you have leaders that say charge forward, we go over the edge. And it feels like in the last decade or so we’ve been see-sawing between the two things. So let me just say that you are quite right, that political violence has been a big part of our country and this is not something that is in any way new to the last few years. And that’s also why you can think about this when you talk about 2016, going back to 1995, with the Oklahoma City bombing here and thinking about things from the right and militia groups and right-wing political violence. Because that in particular from the seventies through 2016, even afterwards of course, has been a big part of our country and what we’ve experienced. But I just have to say a big but here, it’s not just the same old story. Because starting right around 2016, it would’ve been hard to know this in 2016 and even really 2017, ’18 and ’19, you were there right at the beginning of a new layer, so to speak, of political violence that is growing. It’s not that the old layer went away, which is why it’s been a little bit, I think, mystifying and confusing for some folks, and that’s folks who even cover this pretty closely, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League and so forth. Because it took a few years before they started to see that there was some new trends emerging, growing political violence. It was getting larger. The old profiles of who was doing the violent attacks were starting to widen. And in many ways that’s scarier and more dangerous than if they’re kind of narrow because we like our villains to be monsters who are far away from us and they couldn’t possibly be living next door to us. Whereas the closer they come, the more edgy it feels. So what you’re really experiencing there is the very beginning of where I date the beginning of our shift to the era of violent populism. We’re in a new world, but it’s a world on top of the old world. The old world didn’t go away. No, no, no. It feels like the old world is really the foundation that this new house of violence has been raised around. All of that that happened in the past was the foundation. And then in 2016, 2017, some people would say 2014, in that timeframe, the scaffolding began to go up and then Trump gets into office and then suddenly it’s a full-blown house that now all of America is living in. Well, if you look at the attacks on African-Americans, on Jews and Hispanics, except for going all the way back to the 1920 race time, except for that, these large-scale attacks have clustered since 2016. Then we have the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, that’s the largest attack killing, mass killing of Jews ever in the United States. And then we have August, 2019, the attack at the El Paso Walmart killing more Hispanics in a day than has ever been killed in our country. So there’s a pointed wave, if you see what I mean here. And race is certainly playing a role. So when you say how does this tie to the old layer or the existing layer, one of the big foundations here is absolutely race. What’s really sad and really tragic is in this new era of violent populism, that’s a term I like to use because it’s not just the same old, but it’s not quite civil war. In this new era, we’ve seen things move from the fringe where they were bad but happened more or less rarely, to more the mainstream where they’re happening more and more. And our surveys show this, people feel very fearful right now, and there’s actual reason for that. That’s not just media hype. There have been more events. We see them and they are real. We really have a time here that people are, I’m sorry to say, concerned. And there’s reason to be concerned. Yeah, as you say, the thing that pops up in my mind is the fact that white supremacy, which I think for a long time held sway over this country. And then I think that white supremacy in a lot of ways always held onto the power. But there was a time where being a racist was not cool and looked down upon. And so racism, while still evident, still holding people down, it’s built into institutions, all of that. I’m not saying that racism was away, I’m just saying that expressing it openly is now in the mainstream. I mean, we just heard President Trump recently talking about Somalis- Absolutely, yeah. In a very… I mean, just straight up, there is no difference between what he said about Somalis than what a Klansman in the forties in front of a burning cross would say about Black people, like zero difference. Yeah. So the reason I think we are in this new era, because I think you’re right, putting your finger on the mainstreaming of fringe ideas, which we used to think would stay under rocks and so forth, and white supremacy clearly fits that bill. But what I think is important to know is that we are transitioning for the first time in our country’s history from a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy. And social changes like that in other countries around the world, so I’ve studied political violence for 30 years in many countries around the world. Big social changes like that Al, often create super issues with politics, make them more fragile and often lead to political violence. Now, what’s happening in our country is that we’ve been going through a demographic change for quite some time. America up through the 1960s was about 85% white as a country. There was ebbs and flows to be sure. Well, that really started to change bit by bit, drip by drip in the mid 1960s, whereas by 1990 we were 76% white as a country. Today we’re 57% white as a country. In about 10 or 15 years, it depends on mass deportations, and you can see why then that could be an issue, we will become truly a white minority democracy for the first time. And that is one of the big issues we see in our national surveys that helps to explain support for political violence on the right. Because what you’re seeing Al, is the more we are in what I call the tipping point generation for this big demographic shift, the more there are folks on the right, and most of them Trump supporters, mega supporters, who want to stop and actually reverse that shift. Then there of course, once knowing that, there are folks on the left, not everybody on the left, but some on the left that want to keep it going or actually accelerate it a bit for fear that with the mega crowd you won’t get it, the shift will stop altogether. These are major issues and things that really rock politics and then can lead to political violence. Talk to me a little bit about January 6th, when that happened, I’m sure you were watching it on TV. Yeah. What were you thinking as all of it was kind of coming into play? Well, so I was not quite as surprised as some folks, Al. So on October 5th in Chicago, I was on the Talking Head show in Chicago, it’s called Chicago Tonight. So on October 5th, 2020, that was just after the Trump debate where he said to the Proud Boys, stand back, but stand by. Well, the Chicago folks brought me on TV to talk about that, and I said that this was really quite concerning because this has echoes of things we’ve seen in Bosnia with some other leaders that a lot of Americans are just not familiar with, but are really quite worrisome. And I said what this meant was we had to be worried about the counting of the vote, not just ballot day, the day of voting. And we had to be worried about that all the way through January 6th, the certification of the election. But you made a point earlier, Al, about the importance of leaders. This is part of the reason why it’s hard to predict. It’s not a precise science, political violence. I like to use the idea, the analogy of a wildfire when I give talks. When we have wildfires, what we know as scientists is we can measure the size of the combustible material and we know with global warming, the combustible dry wood that could be set afire is getting larger. So you know you’re in wildfire season, but it’s not enough to predict a wildfire because the wildfire’s touched off by an unpredictable set of triggers, a lightning strike, a power line that came down unpredictably. Well, that is also a point about political leaders. So it was really, I did see some sign of this that Donald Trump said too about the Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. And no other president had said anything like that ever before in our history, let’s be clear. And because of my background studying political violence, I could compare that to some playbooks from other leaders in other parts of the world. That said, even I wouldn’t have said, oh yeah, we’re 90% likely to have an event, because who would’ve thought Donald Trump would’ve given the speech at the Ellipse, not just call people to it, it will be wild. His speech at the Ellipse, Al, made it wild. You co-authored a pretty remarkable study that looked at the political geography of January 6th insurrectionists. Can you break down the findings of that paper? Yeah. So one of the things we know when we study as a scholar of political violence, we look at things other people just don’t look at because they just don’t know what’s important. We want to know, where did those people live, where’d they come from? And when you have indictments and then you have the court process in the United States, you get that as a fact. So now it does mean I had to have big research teams. There’s a hundred thousand pages of court documents to go through. But nonetheless, you could actually find this out. And we found out something stunning, Al, and it’s one of the reasons I came back to that issue of demographic change in America. What we found is that first of all, over half of those who stormed the capitol, that 1,576 were doctors, lawyers, accountants, white collar jobs, business owners, flower shop owners, if you’ve been to Washington DC, Al, they stayed at the Willard. I have never stayed at the Willard- Yeah. So my University of Chicago doesn’t provide that benefit. That is crazy to me because I think the general knowledge or what you think is that most of the people that were there were middle class to lower, middle class to poor. At least that’s what I’ve always thought. Yeah, it’s really stunning, Al. So we made some snap judgments on that day in the media that have just stayed with us over and over and over again. So the first is their economic profile. Whoa, these are people with something to lose. Then where did they come from? Well, it turned out they came from all 50 states, but huge numbers from blue states like California and New York. And then we started to look at, well, where are in the states are they coming from? Half of them came from counties won by Joe Biden, blue counties. So then we got even deeper into it. And what’s happening, Al, is they’re coming from the suburbs around the big cities. They’re coming from the suburbs around Chicago, Elmhurst, Schomburg. They’re not coming from the rural parts of Illinois. They’re coming… That’s why we call them suburban rage. They’re coming from the most diversifying parts of America, the counties that are losing the largest share of white population. Back to that issue of population change, these are the people on the front lines of that demographic shift from America is a white majority democracy, to a white minority democracy. These are the counties that will impact where the leadership between Republican and Democrat have either just changed or are about to change. So they are right on the front lines of this demographic change and they are the folks with a lot to lose. And they showed up, some took private planes to get there. This is not the poor part, the white rural rage we’re so used to hearing about. This is well off suburban rage, and it’s important for us to know this, Al, because now we know this with definitiveness here. So it’s not like a hand-wavy guess. And it’s really important because it means you can get much more serious political violence than we’re used to thinking about. Yeah. So what happens, let’s say if circumstances remain as they are, IE, the economy is not doing great, the middle class is getting squeezed and ultimately getting smaller, right? The affordability thing is a real issue. What wins? The first big social change that’s feeding into our plight as a country is this demographic social change. There’s a second one, Al, which is that over the last 30 years, just as we’re having this demographic shift to a white minority democracy, we have been like a tidal wave flowing wealth to the top 1%. And we’ve been flowing wealth to the top 1% of both Republicans and Democrats. And that has been coming out of the bottom 90% of both Republicans and Democrats. Unfortunately, both can be poorer and worse off. Whites can be worse off because of this shift of the wealth to the top 1%. And minorities can be worse off because of the shift. And you might say, well, wait a minute, maybe the American dream, we have social mobility. Well, sorry to say that at the same time, we’re shifting all this money to the top 1%, they’re spending that money to lock up and keep themselves to top 1%. It’s harder to get into that top 1% than it’s ever been in our society. And so what you see is, I just came back from Portland. What you see is a situation in Portland, which is a beautiful place, and wonderful place where ordinary people are constantly talking about how they’re feeling pinched and they’re working three jobs. Yeah. Just to make their middle, even lower middle class mortgages. I mean, this is what’s happening in America and why people have said, well, why does the establishment benefit me? Why shouldn’t I turn a blind eye if somebody’s going to attack the establishment viciously? Because it’s not working for a lot of folks, Al. And what I’m telling you is that you put these two together, you get this big demographic change happening, while you’re also getting a wealth shift like this and putting us in a negative sum society. Whoa, you really now have a cocktail where you’ve got a lot of people very angry, they’re not sure they want to have this shift and new people coming into power. And then on top of that, you have a lot of people that aren’t sure the system is worth saving. I really wanted to dive in on the polls that you’ve been conducting, and one of those, there seems to be a small but growing acceptance of political violence from both Democrats and Republicans. What do you think is driving that? I think these two social changes are underneath it, Al. So in our polls, just to put some numbers here, in 2025, we’ve done a survey in May and we did one in the end of September. So we do them every three or four months. We’ll do one in January I’m sure. And what we found is that on both sides of the political spectrum, high support for political violence. 30% in our most recent survey in September, 30% of Democrats support the use of force to prevent Trump from being president. 30%. 10% of Democrats think the death of Charlie Kirk is acceptable. His assassination was acceptable. These represent millions and millions of adults. That’s a lot of people, you see. What you’re saying is right, we’re seeing it. And I think what you’re really seeing here is as these two changes keep going, this era of violent populism is getting worse. Yeah, I mean, so I’ve seen that Democrats and Republicans are accusing each other of using violent rhetoric. So in your research, what’s actually more common in this modern area where we are right now, is it right wing or left wing on the violent rhetoric, but also who’s actually doing it? So we’ve had, just after the Kirk assassination, your listeners will probably remember and they can Google, we had these dueling studies come out almost instantly, because they’re kind of flash studies and they’re by think tanks in Washington DC. One basically saying there’s more right-wing violence than left. And one saying there’s more left-wing violence than right. Well, I just want your listeners to know that if you go under the hood, so my job is to be like the surgeon and really look at the data. You’re going to be stunned, maybe not so stunned, Al, because you live in the media, to learn the headlines and what’s actually in the content are very different. Both studies essentially have the same, similar findings, although slightly different numbers, which is they’re both going up. They’re both going up. So it’s really not the world that it was either always been one side or now it’s newly the other. So the Trump administration’s rhetoric, JD Vance is wrong to say it’s all coming from the left, but it’s also wrong to say it’s all coming from the right. Now, what I think you’re also seeing, Al, is that the politicians, if left to their own devices, rarely, I’m sorry to say do the right thing, they cater to their own constituents. But there’s some exceptions and they’ve been helpful, I think. There’s two exceptions I want to draw attention to, one who’s a Republican and one who’s a Democrat. On the Democratic side, the person who’s been just spectacular at trying to lower the temperature is Governor Shapiro. He’s a Democrat, the Governor of Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro has given numerous interviews public, where he has condemned violence on all sides. He’s recognizing, as very few others are, that it’s a problem on both sides. He personally was almost burned to death, only minutes from being burned to death with his family here back in April. So he knows this personally about what’s at stake and he has done a great job, I think in recognizing that here. Now on the Republican side, we have Erika Kirk and what Erika Kirk, of course the wife of Charlie Kirk who was assassinated did, was at Kirk’s funeral, she forgave the shooter. But let’s just be clear, she’s a very powerful voice here. Now, I think we need more of those kind of voices, Al, because you see, they really are figures people pay attention to. They’re listening to people like that. They have personal skin in the game and they can speak with sort of a lens on this few others can. But we need more people to follow in that wake and I wish we had that, and that can actually help as we go forward. And I’m hoping they, both of those people will do more and more events, and others who have been the targets of political violence will come out and do exactly the same thing. I want to go back a little bit to January 6th and just talk about those insurrectionists. So when President Trump pardoned them, what was going through your mind? That it was probably going to be the worst thing that happened in the second Trump presidency. And I know I’m saying quite a bit. I know that he’s insulted every community under the sun many, many, many times. But the reason I’m so concerned about this, Al, is that there are many ways we could lose our democracy, but the most worrisome way is through political violence. You see, because the political violence is what would make the democratic backsliding you’re so used to hearing about, irreversible. And then how might that actually happen? You get people willing to fight for Trump. And already on January 6th, we collected all the public statements on their social media videos, et cetera, et cetera, in their trials about why those people did it. And the biggest reason they did it was Trump told them so, and they say this over and over and over again, I did it because Trump told me to do it. Well, now Trump has not forgiven them, he’s actually helping them. They may be suing the government to get millions of dollars in ‘restitution’. So this is going in a very bad way if you look at this in terms of thinking you’re going to deter people from fighting for Trump. And now of course others are going to know that as well on the other side. So again, this is a very dangerous move. Once he pardoned it, no president in history has ever pardoned people who use violence for him. Yeah. So you have the insurrectionist bucket. But there’s another bucket that I’ve been thinking about a lot and I haven’t heard a lot of people talk about this, and that is that under President Trump, ICE has expanded exponentially. Yep. The amount of money that they get in the budget is- Enormous. Enormous. I’ve never seen an agency ramp up, A, within a term, like so much money and so many people- It is about to become its own army. Right. And Al, what this means concretely is, we really don’t want any ICE agents in liberal cities in October, November, December. We don’t want to be in this world of predicting, well, Trump would never do X, he would never do Y. No, we’ve got real history now to know these are not good ways to think. What we just need to do is we need to recognize that when we have national elections that are actually going to determine the future of who governs our country, you want nothing like those agents who, many of them going to be very loyal to Trump, on the ground. We should already be saying, look, we want this to stop on October 1st to December 31st, 2026, and we want to have a clean separation, so there’s no issue here of intimidation. And why would you say that? It’s because even President Trump, do you really want to go down in history as having intimidated your way to victory? So I think we really need to talk about this as a country, Al. And we really want a clean break here in the three months that will be the election, the run-up to the election, the voting, and then the counting of the vote. In closing, one of the major themes of this conversation has been that America is changing into a white minority. The question that just keeps coming to mind to me is, as somebody who studies this, do you think that America can survive that transition? Well, I am going to argue, and I’m still a little nervous about it, but we are in for a medium, soft landing. Okay. One of the things we see is that every survey we’ve done, 70% to 80% of Americans abhor political violence. And that’s on both sides of the aisle. And I think in many ways there are saving grace and it’s why, Al, when we have public conversations about political violence, what we see in our surveys is that helps to take the temperature down. Because you might worry that, oh, we’ll talk about it, we’ll stir people up and they’ll go… It seems to be the other way around, Al, as best we can tell. That there’s 70% to 80% of the population that really, really doesn’t want to go down this road. They know intuitively this is just a bad idea. This is not going to be good for the country, for their goals. And so they are the anchor of optimism that I think is going to carry us to that medium soft landing here. I think we could help that more if we have some more politicians joining that anchor of optimism. They’re essentially giving voice to the 70%, 80%. And if you look at our no Kings protests, the number of people that have shown up and how peaceful they have been, how peaceful they have been, those are the 70% to 80%, Al. And I think that gives me a lot of hope for the future that we can navigate this peacefully. But again, I’m saying it’s a medium soft landing, doesn’t mean we’re getting off the hook without some more… I’m sorry to say, likely violence, yeah. Listen, I’ll take a medium. I would prefer not at all, but the way things are going, I’ll take the medium. Thank you very much. Bob, Professor Robert Pape, it has been such a delight talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time out. Well, thank you Al, and thanks for such a thoughtful, great conversation about this. It’s just been wonderful. So thank you very much.

Democrats’ resounding victories in the New Jersey and Virginia governor’s races got most of the headlines, but the most dramatic results in last month’s elections were downballot. In Virginia, Democratic challengers flipped 13 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates, to secure their largest majority in the chamber in four decades. New Jersey Democrats grew their margin in the assembly by five seats—winning their largest majority since Watergate. Coupled with the party’s string of upset victories and double-digit shifts in special elections last year, the results have some party leaders dreaming big.  How big? A new post-election analysis from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which supports Democratic candidates in statehouse races, argues that the current electoral climate presents the best chance in years for Democrats to consolidate power in blue states, flip battleground chambers, and loosen Republicans’ grip on power in solidly red states like South Carolina and Missouri. > “This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally transform > legislative power.” By the group’s calculations, Democratic candidates over-performed the partisan leaning of their districts this fall by an average of 4.5 points—a shift that would put as many as 651 state legislative seats in play across the country in a midterm election year, and position the party for a bit of long-awaited payback.  “This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally transform legislative power,” said DLCC president Heather Williams. While the November results have many Democrats talking enthusiastically about a repeat of the 2018 blue wave, Williams goes back further: “We are looking at the makings of an environment that looks more like 2010 in reverse.” That year, powered by fallout from the Great Recession and the tea party wave, and assisted by tens of millions of dollars in spending down the stretch, Republicans picked up nearly 700 seats and flipped 22 state legislative chambers. Because those legislatures would go on to control the decennial redistricting process, Republicans were able to not just seize power, but hold onto it for a decade—or longer. The stakes for redistricting this time around are not as clear-cut, but still very much real. For the time being, thanks to Texas’ decision to redraw its maps at President Donald Trump’s request, and California’s own retaliatory effort, every legislative session is a potential redistricting session. In response to Republican efforts earlier this year, the DLCC pushed for Democrats to “go on offense” on redistricting in states they control. “At the end of the day, it is state legislators who are drawing these maps,” Williams says. “This mid-cycle process has both put a spotlight on that, but it’s also sort of clarified the fact that the way that you prevent this from happening in the future—or the way that you get Democrats in this room to have this conversation—is you elect them first.” When I last spoke with Williams, in 2024, the DLCC’s map looked quite a bit different. That year, facing the same headwinds that doomed Democrats at all levels, the organization went into the fall hoping to flip five legislative chambers but ultimately picked up none and—with the exception of an unsuccessful effort to break a Republican supermajority in Kansas—largely confined its efforts to presidential battleground states. This time around, it’s aiming to compete in 41 chambers in 27 states. That includes efforts to break Republican supermajorities in both chambers of the Florida and Missouri legislatures; the Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio, and South Carolina houses; and the North Carolina senate (where Republicans have been able to override some of Democratic Gov. Josh Stein’s vetoes). In November, Democrats already succeeded in breaking Republicans’ supermajority in the Mississippi Senate, after a court struck down the existing legislative maps for violating the Voting Rights Act. The goal, Williams says, is to get more state parties out of the “superminority” status and “into a place where you are at least in the negotiating room.” “Democrats in the states lost a lot of ground in 2010 and in the couple of elections after that, and in that rebuild process, the map changed a lot,” Williams says. “What we are saying in this update to the target map—and frankly, our broader strategy—is that we must show up in these red states. When you think about the long term trajectory of Democrats and our success as a party, we need to recognize these moments of power, and these states where Republicans have been competing, and we need to show up for voters.” But there are also a lot of chambers up for grabs. Part of what makes the map so encouraging for Democrats, Williams argues, is how thin the line currently is between conservative governance and Democratic rule. “Flipping just 19 seats on this map could establish four new Democratic trifectas and six new Democratic majorities,” she said. “The path there is not complicated—it’s really crystal clear.” The DLCC has its eyes on potential governing trifectas in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin. And the group sees potential for new Democratic supermajorities in 10 chambers across eight states—both chambers of the legislature in Colorado and Vermont; the lower levels of the legislature in Delaware, Nevada, New Mexico, and Washington; and the senate in New York; Oregon; and Washington. In at least one way, though, this will be nothing like the tea party wave. This year, the DLCC is aiming to spend $50 million on its national effort in 2026—which the group is billing as the its largest-ever single-year sum. When Republicans swept the table in 2010, the DLCC spent just $10 million.

Timothy Rodriguez has lived in New York all his life. But the notion of a Muslim mayor never entered the realm of possibility for him. That changed Tuesday when Zohran Mamdani’s victory made him New York’s first Muslim and South Asian mayor-elect. “It’s a big win for New York City, of course, it’s a big win for Muslims,” Rodriguez, 35, told me after news of Mamdani’s win broke on Tuesday night. “I’m happy to see change and that these things are possible.” I first met Timothy a few hours earlier, in downtown Brooklyn, outside the Al-Farooq Mosque. It sits on a block of Atlantic Avenue, home to two Middle Eastern grocery stores and shops selling goods such as spices, Islamic decorative arts, and clothing. When we spoke, he and his sister, Ally, 33, had just wrapped up the Asr prayer, one of the five daily prayers for observant Muslims. Neither had voted yet, but they both hoped to see Mamdani elected.  “A lot of Muslims don’t feel like they have a place here,” Timothy said. He hopes that, like former President Barack Obama, Mamdani can “inspire” other Muslim New Yorkers to run for office and help “break the stigma that Muslims aren’t good people.” The siblings cited Mamdani’s relentless focus on affordability for their support. “Prices are high, rent is high,” Timothy said. “ “Especially food,” Ally chimed in, her young daughter hoisted on her hip. The fact that Mamdani is also Muslim, she said, was merely “a bonus.”  Throughout his historic campaign, Mamdani has been outspoken about his faith. According to the New York Times, the 34-year-old democratic socialist visited more than 50 mosques on the campaign trail, with members of his campaign visiting nearly 200. Mamdani has also addressed Islamophobia head-on, in visits to city mosques and online, detailing his and his family members’ experiences with racist attacks after former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo laughed at a conservative radio host’s suggestion that Mamdani would be “cheering” in the event of another 9/11. “That’s another problem,” Cuomo added. (Cuomo later rejected allegations of Islamophobia, claiming that Mamdani was trying to “divide people” by making an issue out of the radio exchange.) But the comments by Cuomo were only the latest in a series of escalating attacks, which started in earnest on the night of Mamdani’s primary upset back in June. As I wrote at the time:  > Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), Donald Trump Jr., Laura Loomer, and Charlie Kirk > were among the right-wingers who fired off Islamophobic smears about Mamdani > and Muslim New Yorkers to their millions of followers after Cuomo’s surprising > concession. The posts come days after reports that Mamdani has faced threats > and attacks prompting an investigation by the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force. Since then, others have piled on. Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa baselessly accused Mamdani of supporting a “global jihad.” Outgoing Mayor Eric Adams also decried the rise of “Islamic extremism” in Europe. Even on Tuesday, as New Yorkers headed to the polls, NBC News reported that a pro-Cuomo super PAC was running a last-minute ad depicting Mamdani in front of the Twin Towers on 9/11, accompanied by a quote from leftie streamer Hasan Piker, saying “America deserved 9/11.” (The Cuomo campaign has sought to tie Mamdani to those comments, even after Mamdani disavowed them as “objectionable and reprehensible.”) “What a lot of this anti-Muslim rhetoric and Islamophobia has done for a lot of people in the city is that people feel like they have their Muslim identity on the sidelines,” Saman Waquad, president of the Muslim Democratic Club, of which Mamdani is a member, told me. Though Waquad said that the racist attacks “put a target on all of our backs,” she was encouraged by Mamdani’s decision to stand proud in his identity as a Muslim New Yorker. “When we see Zohran show up as a Muslim and not shy away, it gives people more courage to come out for him,” she added. “In many ways, he’s one of us.” Noting that the city is home to an estimated one million Muslims, Waquad added: “That’s a lot of folks that are going to feel seen.” Tazul Islam, a 40-year-old office manager from Queens, whom I also met outside the Al-Farooq Mosque on Tuesday afternoon, told me he hopes Mamdani remains proud of his faith once he is officially sworn in as mayor.  “Hopefully, he can fix some of the misunderstandings and myths about the religion,” Islam said. The faith, he added, “has a lot more to do with making the world a more beautiful place than the scare tactics we hear.” 

Despite years of voter suppression efforts by the state’s Republican Party, Virginians have spoken: It’s time for GOP gubernatorial candidate Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears to “go somewhere and sit down.” Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat who represented the state’s 7th District in Congress until this year, defeated Earle-Sears in a highly anticipated race to become the first female governor in the Commonwealth’s centuries-long history. > VA Voter: Spanberger. She out there doing what she's supposed to do. That > other lady? She needs to go somewhere and sit down. pic.twitter.com/72dNcvPWCT > > — Acyn (@Acyn) November 4, 2025 Spanberger beat Earle-Sears by a staggering 12-point margin with close to 80 percent of votes counted, according to Associated Press projections. The 56-44 win—representing well over 300,000 votes—comes at a precarious time for the Democratic Party, with Virginia serving as a critical bellwether for the country’s feelings on President Donald Trump before national midterm elections next year. For years, Virginia Republicans have been working overtime to suppress the state’s Democratic voters, including a blatantly illegal voter roll purge in 2023 orchestrated by then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin. In 2024, the Supreme Court’s conservative bloc ruled in Youngkin’s favor, forcing nearly 1,600 voters to fight for their registration to be reinstated. A year later, shortly after Trump’s re-election, the Justice Department voluntarily dismissed a lawsuit originally brought forth by the Biden administration that once again challenged the purge. Spanberger’s victory is a promising sign for Virginia’s effort, alongside other Democratic-led legislatures, to redraw district lines after states like North Carolina and Texas were subjected to extreme gerrymandering by Republican legislators that functionally disenfranchised a huge swath of their voters. Alongside the governorship, all 100 seats in Virginia’s House of Delegates, the lower chamber of its state legislature, are also up for reelection—which will determine the GOP’s chances of leaving Democratic redistricting dead in the water.

In a wide-ranging Sunday night interview on CBS News’s “60 Minutes,” President Donald Trump put his desire for unchecked power on full display. He bragged to correspondent Norah O’Donnell that, thanks to the Insurrection Act of 1792, he can invade your city whenever he wants. He said immigration raids—including acts of police violence such as using tear gas in residential neighborhoods, throwing people to the ground, and breaking car windows—”haven’t gone far enough.” And he said the government shutdown will last until Democrats in Congress bend to his will—or until Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) agrees to eliminate the filibuster, which Thune, so far, has rejected. Here are some of the biggest takeaways from Trump’s comments on domestic policy: Trump blamed the shutdown on the Democrats As the federal government shutdown enters its fifth week—on pace to be the second-longest in history after the one that stretched from December 2018 into January 2019—O’Donnell had a straightforward question for Trump: “What are you doing as president to end the shutdown?” His answer? Blaming the Democrats. “The Republicans are voting almost unanimously to end it, and the Democrats keep voting against ending it,” Trump said. “They’ve lost their way,” he added. “They become crazed lunatics.” Senate Democrats have said they will vote to reopen the government if the legislation includes an extension of Obamacare subsidies; without those, the health policy think tank KFF has estimated, average monthly premiums on people who get their insurance through the ACA marketplace would more than double. Trump also claimed Obamacare is “terrible,” adding, “We can make it much less expensive for people and give them much better health care.” But, yet again, he failed to outline his alternative. (Remember his “concepts of a plan“?) > What is President Trump doing to end the government shutdown? > > “What we're doing is we keep voting. I mean, the Republicans are voting almost > unanimously to end, and the Democrats keep voting against ending it,” says > Trump. pic.twitter.com/f6smwqi8Jn > > — 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 3, 2025 He defended Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s violent tactics Citing videos of ICE officers tackling a mother in court, using tear gas in a residential neighborhood in Chicago, and smashing car windows, O’Donnell asked Trump if some of the raids have “gone too far?” Trump gave what may have been his most direct answer of the interview: “No, I think they haven’t gone far enough,” he said. “We’ve been held back by the judges, by the liberal judges that were put in [the federal courts] by Biden and by Obama.” “You’re okay with those tactics?” O’Donnell pressed. “Yeah, because you have to get the people out,” he replied. > "I think they haven't gone far enough," says President Trump, defending ICE > raids. In one case, ICE tackled a young mother and in another tear gas was > used in a residential neighborhood. pic.twitter.com/b7tEYqWyUv > > — 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 2, 2025 He bragged that he can send the military into any city, at any time O’Donnell asked Trump what he meant when, at a speech in Japan last week, he said: “If we need more than the National Guard, we’ll send more than the National Guard.” Trump has already sent guard troops into Washington, DC; Los Angeles; Portland, Ore.; Chicago; and Memphis, Tenn. Trump seemed delighted to remind O’Donnell and viewers of what he sees as his vast power: “Well, if you had to send in the Army, or if you had to send in the Marines, I’d do that in a heartbeat. You know you have a thing called the Insurrection Act. You know that, right? Do you know that I could use that immediately, and no judge can even challenge you on that. But I haven’t chosen to do it because I haven’t felt we need it.” > “If you had to send in the Army or if you had to send in the Marines, I'd do > that in a heartbeat,” says President Trump. He has ordered the National Guard > to five major U.S. cities. https://t.co/GAtK4KJNAf pic.twitter.com/Yx0SoiGDFQ > > — 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 3, 2025 This is not the first time Trump has threatened to use the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to override federal law that prohibits the military from acting as law enforcement, in order to “suppress rebellion.” But the law has not been used in more than three decades and is widely seen by legal experts as having a frightening potential for abuse. “So you’re going to send the military into American cities?” O’Donnell pressed. “Well, if I wanted to, I could, if I want to use the Insurrection Act,” Trump responded. “The Insurrection Act has been used routinely by presidents, and if I needed it, that would mean I could bring in the Army, the Marines, I could bring in whoever I want, but I haven’t chosen to use it. I hope you give me credit for that.” He claimed he has been “mild-mannered” when it comes to political retribution In only nine months, Trump has made good on his long-running promise to prosecute his political enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey, former National Security Advisor John Bolton, and New York Attorney General Letitia James. “There’s a pattern to these names. They’re all public figures who have publicly denounced you. Is it political retribution?” O’Donnell asked. Trump promptly played the victim: “You know who got indicted? The man you’re looking at,” he replied. “I got indicted and I was innocent, and here I am, because I was able to beat all of the nonsense that was thrown at me.” (He was, indeed, found guilty in New York last year on 34 felony counts in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case.) > “I think I've been very mild-mannered. You're looking at a man who was > indicted many times, and I had to beat the rap,” says President Trump after > the recent indictments of high-profile figures who have publicly denounced > him. https://t.co/XHoIr77Eh1 pic.twitter.com/tLH0fxW2wI > > — 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 3, 2025 Despite posting a Truth Social message in September demanding that Attorney General Pam Bondi speed up the prosecutions, just days before Comey was indicted and a couple weeks before Bolton and James were, Trump insisted he did not instruct the Department of Justice to pursue them. “No, you don’t have to instruct them, because they were so dirty, they were so crooked, they were so corrupt,” he said, proceeding to praise the work of Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel. “I think I’ve been very mild-mannered,” Trump continued. “You’re looking at a man who was indicted many times, and I had to beat the rap, otherwise I couldn’t have run for president.” He think he’s “better looking” than Zohran Mamdani Trump insisted that the frontrunner in New York City’s Tuesday mayoral election, 34-year-old self-described Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, is a “Communist.” When O’Donnell asked Trump what he makes of comparisons between himself and Mamdani—”charismatic, breaking the old rules,” as O’Donnell put it—Trump replied: “I think I’m a much better-looking person than him.” He then reiterated his threat to withhold federal funding from his home city if Mamdani wins over ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo. “It’s going to be hard for me as the president to give a lot of money to New York, because if you have a Communist running New York, all you’re doing is wasting the money you’re sending there,” Trump said. He claimed that he is “not a fan of Cuomo one way or the other,” but added, “If it’s going to be between a bad Democrat and a Communist, I’m going to pick the bad Democrat all the time, to be honest with you.” > Some have called Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic socialist front-runner for New > York City mayor, a left-wing version of President Trump. > > "I think I'm a much better looking person than him," says Trump, after calling > Mamdani a "communist." pic.twitter.com/p9FDWNcoGs > > — 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 2, 2025

Zohran Mamdani hadn’t been Regina Weiss’ first choice for mayor of New York City. She’d ranked city comptroller Brad Lander number-one on her primary ballot in June, and told me she wished that the 33-year-old Democratic Socialist state assemblymember brought a bit more experience to the job. But Weiss, who volunteers with Indivisible, was happily supporting the Democratic nominee now, and expected to begin canvassing for him soon. What she couldn’t understand, she told me, as she waited for the candidate to take the stage with Sen. Bernie Sanders at the “Fighting Oligarchy” town hall in Brooklyn on Saturday, was why some of the biggest names in her party weren’t doing the same. “I’ve never seen this before—I’ve never seen the Democratic leadership not endorse the Democratic candidate,” she said. “It’s so ugly, it’s so cowardly, it’s so stupid. The Democrats are basically in the crapper when it comes to enthusiasm. You’ve got this guy—the Democratic candidate for the biggest city in the country—and they’re not endorsing him.”  > “One might think—one might think!—that if a candidate starting at 2 percent in > the polls, gets 50,000 volunteers, creates enormous excitement, gets young > people involved in the political process, gets non-traditional voters to vote, > Democratic leaders will be jumping up and down! ‘This is our guy!’” Weiss put her hands to her face in frustration. She’d been reading happily before I came along. “Sorry, I’m very angry about this,” she said. “What is it? Is it like they’re afraid? I mean, I guess they’re afraid, but my God!” Two months out from one of the biggest elections since Trump won the presidency, most Democratic voters in New York City are on board with their party’s nominee. After defeating disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo by double digits in the primary, Mamdani leads him comfortably again in four-way general-election polls. Scandal-plagued mayor Eric Adams and Republican Curtis Sliwa are barely visible in the distance. Mamdani has raised the maximum amount allowable under the city’s matching-funds system, maintained a relentless schedule of campaign appearances and media hits, and even talked privately with Barack Obama. His support among elected officials is real. Four members of the city’s congressional delegation have publicly endorsed him—including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with whom he’d appeared a few hours before the town hall. Along the side wall of the packed auditorium at Brooklyn College, city council members and state legislators milled about, mingling with Mamdani’s top advisors and the omnipresent former Rep. Jamaal Bowman (who has cut an ad for the candidate, brought Mamdani to a Wu-Tang show, and co-hosted a community event for him in the South Bronx). But it was hard to ignore who hadn’t gotten on board. Even as Trump threatened to unleash hell on New York City, and the president dangled an ambassadorship to lure Adams out of the race, some of the most powerful Democrats in the city and the state have been deafeningly quiet. Gov. Kathy Hochul, who helped force Cuomo’s resignation as governor, is publicly agnostic on whether Mamdani or Cuomo should run America’s largest city. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, after previously avoiding questions about the race by insisting that he does not endorse in primaries, has still not made an endorsement more than two months after the primary. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries has thus far avoided backing Mamdani while egging on criticisms of his housing policy. Reps. Dan Goldman and Ritchie Torres, junior Democrats with outsized national profiles, have withheld thei support, while suggesting that the nominee has not done enough to condemn anti-semitism. That Rep. Tom Suozzi, whose Long Island district includes parts of Queens, told a TV interviewer Mamdani should leave the party is not so surprising. That Rep. Greg Meeks—the chair of the Queens Democratic Party—is still holding out is a bit more glaring. For the party’s left-wing, often accused by more moderate factions of hampering Democrats’ big-tent efforts, Mamdani’s nomination poses an obvious question: What kind of “big tent” party doesn’t have room for the party’s own candidate and the majority of its voters?  As Ocasio-Cortez recently put it, “Are we a party that rallies behind our nominee, or not?” For the most part, the rally at Brooklyn College, a brisk walk away from Sanders’ childhood home in Midwood, was an upbeat affair. Sanders has been holding these “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies since February, and in always-unsaid ways they’ve sometimes felt like a passing of the torch. Mamdani told the crowd about gathering signatures for his first assembly campaign outside a Sanders rally in 2019, and of building out a volunteer base by inviting people to the senator’s debate watch parties. He spoke in some detail about Sanders’ tenure as mayor of Burlington, Vermont—evidence that a socialist can run a city pretty well, but also, that a socialist running a city still feels pretty banal much of the time. (He “took on a broken property tax system,” Mamdani said, and worked “to transform the Lake Champlain waterfront.”) A few protestors tried to spoil the fun, but never to much effect. At one point, a man with a Cuban flag on his shirt stood up to call the candidate a communist.  “Brother, I’m here with another Democratic Socialist,” said a smiling Mamdani, referring to Sanders. But the lack of support from high-ranking Democrats was an unavoidable topic. During the Q&A portion of the event, a guy from Canarsie stood up to express his fear that history was repeating. “I just look at this campaign and it reminds me a little bit of what happened a few years ago in Buffalo,” he said.  The man was referring to that city’s 2021 mayoral election, when India Walton, a 29-year-old nurse, defeated the incumbent mayor in the primary—only to lose to the same candidate in the general election. Billionaire donors’ support for Cuomo, and the party’s tepid response, was giving him “deja vu.” “How do we make sure that something like like this doesn’t happen again?” he asked.  Mamdani’s response was fairly diplomatic. “We have to beat Andrew Cuomo one more time,” he said, because, “This is a man who does not understand that no means no.” He urged the crowd to continue volunteering and organizing. But Sanders sounded like he had been waiting for something like this. And like Weiss, the woman I spoke with before the town hall, he was fired up. “I want to, if I might—I want to add a point to that very good question,” he said, standing up from his chair and walking toward the front of the stage. “It may be a little bit out of place here, but I want to do it. I find it a little bit strange that when we have a candidate who competed very hard, as did a number of other people in the Democratic primary—”  He turned to Mamdani.  “My understanding is you won that primary. Is that correct?,” Sanders asked. Mamdani nodded.  “My understanding is you are the Democratic Party candidate for mayor of the city of New York. Is that correct?” Mamdani nodded again.  “Now, apropos that question: I find it hard to understand how the major Democratic leaders in New York State are not supporting the Democratic candidate,” Sanders continued. “One might think—one might think!—that if a candidate starting at 2 percent in the polls, gets 50,000 volunteers, creates enormous excitement, gets young people involved in the political process, gets non-traditional voters to vote, Democratic leaders would be jumping up and down! ‘This is our guy!’” The senator seemed to be saying what everyone else was thinking. The response from the crowd was surpassed, perhaps, only by Sanders’ earlier condemnation of American weapons sales in Israel. And the two sentiments are not really unrelated—in the case of both Israel and Mamdani, high-profile Democrats are substantially out of step with Democratic voters, and well-funded attempts to weaponize Mamdani’s criticism of Israel in the primary only served to underscore the qualities that made him appealing to voters. That moment, and the two Democratic Socialists’ presence on stage together, was a reminder of both how much and how little had changed since I’d last checked in on the Fighting Oligarchy Tour last spring. At the time, it felt like a post-election low. While elected Democrats had, individually and in small groups, sought to demonstrate their opposition to Trump and Elon Musk’s rampage through Washington, the party had little to show from those first few months. Senate Democrats had just caved to approve a Republican funding measure and avert a government shutdown. Purportedly ambitious figures seemed to prefer litigating wokeness to putting out the fire in their house. And Democratic voters were watching this and going, what the hell? Covering Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez for two stops in Arizona, I had been struck by just how un-Bernie-like the crowds were; the normie Democrats were showing support for the Democratic Socialists, because the Democratic Socialists were showing up for them when so many powerful people and institutions were not. Fast forward to today, and the party’s leaders in Washington seem ready to cave on another shutdown fight this month. A lot of people still sound more comfortable complaining about trans rights than fascism. It’s not too simplistic to say that the leadership that can’t unite behind Mamdani now is the leadership that made Mamdani possible—a cynical and bloodless and compromised liberalism that’s hovering tentatively by the focus groups while real popular movements takes shape on their own. Sanders started holding these events, he explained earlier this year, because to his surprise, no one else was. For Trump’s opponents, this shift toward autocracy represents both a challenge and an opportunity—one that Sanders has laid the foundation for, and Mamdani and his movement have now seized. When no one else is coming to save you, you have to save yourselves.

Conspiracy theorist and self-described “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer continues to wield a jarring amount of power in the Trump administration. The latest example: She appears to have had a Democratic Senator’s classified visit to a military spy agency cancelled. On Wednesday, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that his visit to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA)’s Virginia headquarters had been cancelled after Loomer launched what Warner called “a campaign of baseless attacks” on social media against him and the NGA’s Director, Vice Admiral Frank Whitworth, who is also known as “Trey.” The classified visit, planned for Friday, had not been publicized. It was intended to be an oversight visit to the agency, which works within the Department of Defense (DOD) to provide intelligence through maps and satellites. But in a series of X posts on Sunday, Loomer called Warner a “Russia Hoaxer” and alleged the NGA “is infested with Trump haters” because Whitworth was appointed under former President Joe Biden. “Why are the Pentagon and [intelligence community] allowing for the Director of an Intel agency to host a rabid ANTI-TRUMP DEMOCRAT SENATOR at NGA under the Trump administration?” Loomer asked. On X, Warner said that Loomer “is basically a Cabinet member at this point.” And in a YouTube video discussing the news, Warner said it appears that Loomer “actually has more power and sway than [Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth or [National Intelligence Director] Tulsi Gabbard.” Then he ticked off several recent examples of Loomer’s apparent power in the defense and intelligence sectors. After an Oval Office meeting earlier this year in which Loomer alleged some members of the National Security Council were disloyal to Trump, the president fired six of them. In May, she claimed credit for Trump’s firing of National Security Adviser Mike Waltz. Warner also said Loomer also appears to have had a role in Trump revoking the national security clearances of 37 current and former officials last month, and in the firing of the Defense Intelligence Agency Director Jeffrey Kruse. Spokespeople for the White House and Defense Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones. Loomer told the New York Times that she learned of the classified meeting from someone inside the intelligence community, and claimed that Warner should “be removed from office and tried for treason.” On X, she said that Whitworth should be fired. In a meeting with reporters on Wednesday, Warner said Loomer’s influence “is the kind of thing that happens in authoritarian regimes,” according to the New York Times. “You purge your independent intelligence community and make them loyal not to a constitution but something else.” Warner also told the Times he is concerned about what the cancellation of the visit means for congressional oversight. “Is congressional oversight dead?” he asked. “If we are not doing oversight, if the intelligence is potentially being cooked or being bent to meet the administration’s needs, and we end up in a conflict—the American people have the right to say, ‘How the hell did this happen?'” Several Democrat members of Congress have reported being denied oversight visits to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities in recent months. When you consider Loomer’s politics, her sway in the White House seems even more jarring. And as former Mother Jones reporter Ali Breland explained in a piece when Loomer lost her 2022 congressional primary in Florida, her politics pretty much boil down to one word: Racism. > She has a years-long history of raw, unfiltered Islamophobia that possibly > reached its zenith when she said, after 50 people were killed in a New Zealand > mosque, that: “Nobody cares about [the] Christchurch [shooting]. I especially > don’t. I care about my social media accounts and the fact that Americans are > being silenced.” (Loomer was bemoaning those kicked off websites like Twitter > for being racist.) > > > > She did not change her rhetoric to make herself more palatable for Congress > during the campaign. Loomer recently shared an article that lamented the > “accelerating” of the “erasing” of “America’s white history.”  She’s also kept > up a public dialogue with Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist, who endorsed her. > In March, Loomer went on white nationalist Jared Taylor’s podcast. Right Wing > Watch has documented her saying things like “I’m a really big supporter of the > Christian nationalist movement,” and “I’m going to fight for Christians, I’m > going to fight for white people, I’m going to fight for nationalist > movements.” Despite—or maybe because of—this, Loomer’s influence continues to grow. As I reported last month, Loomer managed to convince the State Department to halt visitor visas to people from Gaza, including humanitarian medical visas for injured children. This weekend, when she wasn’t trashing Warner or Whitworth on X, she celebrated a new development: The State Department went further, suspending almost all visitor visas for Palestinian passport holders, as she had called for. “Thank you, @SecRubio!” Loomer wrote.